Tag: Science

A special thanks to Ken Ham, the Science Bloke, and Bill Nye, the Science Guy, for getting together last night to debate Creationism.

For Bill Nye, he was kind of in a “damned if you do” and a “damned if you don’t” situation regarding whether or not to debate the issue. I appreciate his courage to do what many have refused to do. I believe we all were enriched by the debate.

New Scientist is reporting on a fascinating study out of UCSD; New Scientist says “two per cent of readers may be surprised to discover that they are members of an elite group with the power to perceive the geography of time.”

These individuals perceive months of the year as “circular shapes” and can even see them “projected out into the real world”. Does that sound cool or what?

Over at Live Science, Benjamin Radford writes in his article on product secret recipes that he had planned to reveal the secret formula for Coke Classic until he received a threatening email:

Coca Cola Classic Summer Flag

I had planned to reveal the whole Coke Classic formula, but as I prepared this column I got a threatening e-mail from someone who told me that if I did, he would “get medieval” on me. He referred obliquely to various implements of torture including thumb screws and the Billy Ray Cyrus single “Achy Breaky Heart.”

The NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured this image of NGC 7049, a mysterious looking galaxy on the border between spiral and elliptical galaxies. NGC 7049 is found in the constellation of Indus, and is the brightest of a cluster of galaxies, a so-called Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG). Typical BCGs are some of the oldest and most massive galaxies. They provide excellent opportunities for astronomers to study the elusive globular clusters lurking within.

The globular clusters in NGC 7049 are seen as the sprinkling of small faint points of light in the galaxy’s halo. The halo – the ghostly region of diffuse light surrounding the galaxy – is composed of myriads of individual stars and provides a luminous background to the remarkable swirling ring of dust lanes surrounding NGC 7049’s core. Globular clusters are very dense and compact groupings of a few hundreds of thousands of stars bound together by gravity. They contain some of the first stars to be produced in a galaxy. NGC 7049 has far fewer such clusters than other similar giant galaxies in very big, rich groups. This indicates to astronomers how the surrounding environment influenced the formation of galaxy halos in the early Universe.

The image was taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble, which is optimised to hunt for galaxies and galaxy clusters in the remote and ancient Universe, at a time when our cosmos was very young.

The constellation of Indus, or the Indian, is one of the least conspicuous in the southern sky. It was named in the 16th century by Dutch astronomer Petrus Plancius from observations made by Dutch navigator Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Dutch explorer Frederick de Houtman.

Ian O’Neill at Universe Today believes North Korea’s launch of a Taepoding missile was a partial success.

O’Neill writes, “The Taepoding-2 rocket didn’t make it into space at all, and rather than orbiting the Earth, the communications satellite now rests at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. However, this is a worrying development, the missile had a successful first-staging, propelling the rocket over Japanese airspace, a technical success in itself…”